Diamond Head (31 page)

1943–1964

H
ONOLULU
, H
AWAII

Maku’s love for my mom was the most genuine love that I have witnessed in my lifetime. Every morning that he woke up next to her, I know he felt alive, lucky to find such beauty beside him. He knew everything about her; he remembered every detail. On my mom’s vanity, where she does her makeup every morning, there is a vase that once held birds of paradise. Every week, for as long as I can remember, Maku would replace them for her. He would rinse out the vase for the next bouquet; he would trim the stems to an angle.

When we could afford only one car, it went to my mom. Maku biked to work that year; he said he enjoyed the exercise. They had a table at the Pacific Broiler, my mother’s favorite restaurant, where they had dinner every Friday. Even after they became regulars, when there was no longer any need to make a reservation, Maku still called. He would ask the hostess to put aside a crème brûlée; he would confirm that they still had a crab cake. On the weekends, I’d walk with my parents downtown and my mom would point in a window.
How pretty
, she would say, because that was all it took. Within a week, usually less, a gift-wrapped package would appear on the kitchen counter. He’d write her name on the card, as if we’d mistake it as a gift for someone else. And there was always a card, something generic but lovely; an old-fashioned touch that he never once forgot.

My mom turned thirty and Maku took her to Paris, to drink champagne in its birthplace, he told her as she stared at the tickets. It never once occurred to me that my parents weren’t in love. I thought my mom was modest, self-conscious perhaps. The fact that they never
hugged or kissed, that they never held hands, it didn’t bother me. These things, until recently, had never crossed my mind.

Ten months into her marriage, long before I was born, my mom tried to leave Maku. She told me this the week after Maku died, I believe, to make a point. She wanted to show me how long, how many years she had spent unhappy.

She told me she called a lunch that day. She invited my Auntie B and two of her girlfriends and when they had ordered, she made her announcement.

She was unhappy, she told them. She was unhappy and she wanted a divorce.

My mom assumed that her friends would encourage her decision, that they would tell her to flee her hopeless marriage—so when her announcement was greeted by a long, uncomfortable pause, my mom was not prepared.

“What?” she asked, her eyes stopping on each averted stare. “What? You don’t agree?”

Obviously, I thought to myself, they would not agree. Thinking of my mom and her newly charmed life, thinking of my Auntie B and the
tita
girlfriends they knew from back home, this surprised me not at all. She couldn’t see the departure of their lives? She didn’t hear the arrogance in her announcement? I held in these questions, I simply listened because the answer was clear to me. Even ten months into her marriage, my mom was somewhere else. She lived so much in her head that while her life transitioned around her, her thoughts had stayed behind. She was not yet a Leong; in the space where she lived, in her mind, there was still hope for something else, something better.

It had been three days since Maku died and I had so much anger, so much resentment toward my mom that I knew whatever came out would be purposefully cruel. I held my tongue for selfish reasons; there was no time, no energy for another fight and I needed her to finish. I had my own point to make, and while I couldn’t be
certain, I placed my bet on the reluctance that had suddenly come over her.

“So what did they say?” I prodded. “Your friends, they must have said something.”

My mom was caught; I could see it. She knew she couldn’t end the story there, knew that she had not made the case she had set out to make. She inhaled slowly through her nose, her eyes resting in her lap where her hands sat quietly.

“It was your Auntie B,” she said, pausing, taking a second breath.

“She told me I was wrong. She told me I was wrong if I thought there was something better out there.
Don’t be stupid
, that’s what she said.”

Her sister’s words. My mom had suppressed them, but she had never forgotten. She continued the story as if it came all at once, forcefully, a part of her memory that had been silenced for decades.

That day, my mom looked across the table at each of her childhood friends and found the same nervousness in their eyes, the same hesitancy on their lips, because it mattered nothing at all to them that her husband was a stiff and her marriage shaky and they no longer lived in the largest mansion in all of Oahu. These women, these girls from my mom’s past, they were all still single, all still living in their parents’ houses, still working jobs that required uniforms and name tags and bottles of all-purpose cleaner. They all wanted to be married, to own a house in Hawaii Kai with a man who took them out for dinner, shy or strange or otherwise. It didn’t matter. They grew up poor together—all of them courted by the same overinflated, big-bodied mokes who ended up in jail or knocking you up, running away. My mom had left Kaneohe, she had escaped that fate and they marveled at her good fortune. They coveted her life.

“Is it really that bad?” her sister asked. My mom looked at my Auntie B and considered her words. Beverly, without a doubt, would marry her on-again, off-again boyfriend and raise her family in the Palama projects where they already lived. She would not
go to college, nor would any of her children. Her boyfriend had already been to jail—twice. The path she was on had very few exits.

I felt the defeat in my mom’s voice, even as she told the story twenty years later. I know that if she had her way, if she could have rewritten this conversation, her friends would have said something else, or she would have had different friends—girls who had been to the top of Diamond Head, to the height of the Pali and looked down on the world as she had, who saw the fragility, the urgency to live for something spectacular.

But she didn’t, and in the end, she couldn’t explain it.

So feebly, and with tremendous effort, my mom embarked upon the strange task of trying to love her husband, of trying to
feel
lucky. She went home that night and made lists of all the good things that she admired in Maku. Responsible, she wrote at the very top, followed by generous, kind, and patient. The lists were long and comprehensive, the most important of the traits made bold by dozens of strokes of her pen. She decided that she liked the way he smelled when he got out of the shower—how the woodiness of eucalyptus lingered on his shoulders. She liked the way he ordered wine; with authority, swirling the first sip in his mouth, actually knowing what he was tasting. Lastly, she liked the look of release in his eyes when he came home to find her sitting on the couch at the end of the day, sewing or watching TV—so thankful that she was still there. But I suppose for my mom, all this wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. The lists and the eucalyptus and the constant doting did not add up to a happy marriage.

Sometimes I joke to my friends that I was a mistake, but I know now that’s wrong. Everything about my birth was planned, everything about my life, my purpose, was considered for years before I was conceived. I was a last-ditch effort to save my mom, a final attempt to validate her life and her marriage, and only now do I see how terribly I failed.

It took my mom two years of marriage, two years of emptiness and mental isolation to decide that she was ready to have a child. Maku asked her regularly, attempting to talk her through her apprehensions but their talk went in circles, my mom never able to reveal to him why she resisted. But Maku wanted a child so desperately, and as the second year of my parents’ marriage came to a close, my mom could no longer find a reason to deny him. So the following Friday, over crab cakes and crème brûlée, my mom acquiesced. She told Maku she was ready, finally ready to be a mother.

I was born in June 1945, to a parade of well-wishers. My Uncle Kaipo was newly married but still childless. I was the first of a new generation; a fresh start, an untainted life.

I’m told I was a beautiful baby. Seven pounds, seven ounces, twenty-one inches long with a full head of hair. I arrived via emergency cesarean, thirteen days late. I came out smiling, my mom smiling back at me, her eyes shining from tears and anesthesia and happy anticipation. She said it was the greatest joy she had ever felt. She told me that day, seeing me for the first time, she was certain that she would be better, that she would find a way to be happy. The name Theresa means to harvest, to reap the rewards of hard work. My mom, she was the gardener and I was the crop. Even before I was born, she put her faith in the power of sweat. She believed that if she gave enough effort, if she paid enough attention, her daughter would grow and flourish. My mom trusted in the end, that with time, she would harvest the good that she had planted.

From kindergarten through the twelfth grade they sent me to Punahou, the best private school on Oahu. I was a lifer, a rarity—one of the wealthy kids whose parents got them into Punahou early.

I’ve come to realize that school in Hawaii functions differently from many other places. Private schools here are for education, solely and out of necessity. It doesn’t take a mastermind to look at the public schools and understand that the way to get an island kid into college is through the golden gates of Punahou, but it does take
money, thirteen years of it—an amount that could send four kids to college.

Even as kids, we talked about it. We knew our school looked nothing like the ones down the street with the rusty chain-link fences and the sad sprinkling of brown grass, the tetherball poles with just a rope, the basketball hoops with no net. We wore uniforms. We went to services in a chapel lit by stained-glass windows. We had a carnival with games and malasadas with mango chutney and hula with live music and a man who juggled fire.

When parents got divorced or a dad lost his job, I watched my classmates leave for public schools closer to their dad’s new condo on the windward side, in the country. It was normal, it happened every year, but not once did I fear this would happen to me. And it wasn’t because Maku was a teacher at my school. My parents were planners; I understood that early on. Breakfast was prepared the night before, cereal and a banana lay beside my empty bowl, set on the table with a napkin and a spoon. Scraps of paper with lists of groceries and chores and errands littered every surface of our house, emptied from every pocket when we did laundry. And laundry was done twice a week: clothes on Wednesdays, towels and linens on Sundays. The idea of divorce, it never crossed my mind. For a divorce there had to be fighting, there had to be a degree of spontaneity, and in my house I felt a calm assurance that our days would be the same, even certainty. Our lives would run on schedule. My parents planned for thirteen years of Punahou, the best education they could buy—and barring some unforeseeable disaster, I knew it would unfold exactly as they planned.

My mom kept her job as a seamstress. From kindergarten through the fifth grade she would make my clothes by hand, taking my measurements, letting me choose my own fabrics and patterns, shortening hems and adding sleeves on demand. I thought about our time together all during my days at school; I couldn’t wait to see my mom in the parking lot, to decide what we would make that night, what we
would eat, what we would listen to. I sailed into her arms, actually running to her, my classmates lingering in the hallways, my excitement to see her never diminished. My mom dazzled me with her ability to make anything I wanted; anything I saw in a window or a magazine was mine after a short trip to the fabric store, my favorite place, the bolts of cloth calling out to me with such ambition, my faith planted firmly in my mother’s able fingers.

Then, at home, her foot on the tan petal, the steady pump of her heel, the whir of her machine—that sound, that even hum of my mother’s diligence, it’s all colored differently now. She kept the clothes. She never told me but I found them, unlabeled, as if it were shameful that she preserve the proof. My mom and I, there was a time when we were everything.

All through lower school, for five years, twenty seasons, we had matching outfits. Cotton
mu’u mu’us
with crocheted collars, bright floral holokus, papaya-colored shifts, an absurd creation of velvet and floral fashioned into overalls. We spent a hundred weekends sitting together in her sewing room, listening to the radio and eating kakimochi rice crackers with nori and sesame, with sour, powdery li hing plum, each other’s only friend. With the exception of my Auntie B, my mom had no friends, and for the longest time it seemed perfectly normal because neither did I. I wonder now if she intentionally kept me for herself—if that’s how desperately she needed a companion. But it’s not true. We fed off each other, needing each other in the same way, for protection and validation and understanding. I was an awkward child, if not innately then because I was poorly socialized. I talked only of chain stitches and slip stiches and buttonholes, and when the kids at school looked at me with bewilderment, I would try to explain in detail. They teased me, and after a while I began to break. The words of others, the judgments of girls wearing clothes with tags, with labels and zippers with logos that you couldn’t buy in fabric shops—without warning, they began to put cracks in my world.